Superintendent Pat Cooper, who has spent his first year in the job trying to raise the Lafayette Parish School System’s standing among Louisiana public school systems, faced a reprimand from the school board.

And riding to his defense came a big contingent of community leaders with a single message: Cooper has a plan. Let him do the job.

These are from reporter Amanda McElfresh’s tweets during the meeting:

Stuller President/CEO Jay Jackson: company recruits execs from across country; No. 1 obstacle is Louisiana’s public education system

[Margaret) Trahan of United Way: Cooper is the CEO, deserves freedom to act even if board disagrees. “Empower your superintendent; don’t reprimand him.”

[Cajundome Director Greg] Davis talking about District 4, mostly in north Lafayette. Has low-performing schools, but he thinks Cooper and plan can change that.

Military veteran/community member Bob Lowe to board re: Cooper: “Get out of his way and let him do his job.”

In the movies, the school board members would have been shamed into repentance, and Cooper would have been carried away on the shoulders of an adoring public.

This isn’t the movies.

Cooper contributed to his own difficulties with the hiring of transportation and facilities aide Thad Welch despite a job description that demanded a high school diploma. Welch doesn’t have one.

Cooper’s defense – that the system has hired at least 34 others who lacked some requirement or other – doesn’t exactly cement the superintendent’s position as an opponent of the status quo, does it?

Cooper’s administration also has, by all accounts, made a hash out of a new discipline policy that is guided by the idea that troublesome kids shouldn’t be thrown out of school. N.P. Moss is being turned into a campus staffed to deal with disciplinary hard cases. Until the new campus is completely ready, seriously disruptive kids have been, by all accounts, foisted back on classroom teachers too soon and without major consequences.

Complaints about discipline added legitimacy to other complaints that could be viewed as obstacles to reform – complaints about standardized testing and about new teacher evaluation and tenure rules.

But when all those influential people rose in Cooper’s defense Wednesday, more important issues came into focus.

Before this board was elected, and before Cooper arrived with ambitious plans for improving public schools here, the prevailing Central Office attitude was that our schools were good enough. We barely reach the top third of Louisiana school systems, one of our high schools has teetered on the edge of failure, and the performance of schools serving large low-income and minority populations was indefensible.

But the schools were good enough.

The community repeated its emphatic response Wednesday: No, our schools aren’t good enough.

***

A few years ago, Bobby Jindal was one of the most popular governors in the country.

But on Tuesday, Southern Media & Opinion Research released a poll showing Jindal’s approval rating at 38 percent. That’s down 13 points from SMOR’s October poll.

The poll was conducted March 18-20 with 600 randomly chosen Louisiana voters interviewed by telephone. The margin of error was 4 percent.

The kicker here is that SMOR is the firm of Bernie Pinsonat, who is a conservative guy. There can be no honest objection that the poll was skewed in a liberal direction, as was the case with other recent polls.

Jindal has pushed through major education reforms, some of which – notably the school voucher program – have been challenged with some success in court. The governor’s plan to rely on private provider networks to handle the Medicaid caseload hit a snag when CNSI, the company that won a $200 million contract to coordinate the new system, became the target of a federal investigation. Health and Hospitals Secretary Bruce Greenstein, a former CNSI employee, resigned his cabinet post, and the administration canceled the contract.

Federal officials are also asking questions about the agreements under which private entities have been hired to run some of the previously state-run charity hospitals.

And now it’s unclear that Jindal can summon up the legislative muscle needed to enact his proposal to raise sales taxes while eliminating income and franchise taxes.

One Response to Politics in a nonpolitical year

Pretty good summary of the current situation, except for the “community” supporting Dr. Cooper.

Prior to the current, well-orchestrated cheerleading by various “stakeholders”, numerous career classroom teachers broke with the tradition of silence and put themselves on the line, in order to reveal the utter failure of Dr. Cooper’s “discipline” directives.

These are the only people who can really alter the outcomes for our students — plans, schemes and decress from on-high, notwithstanding. It was shocking to see the “community” completely ignore the impassioned pleas for help and support from these front-line educators. It was as if their concerns had never even been expressed. The “plan” is what it’s all about, not what actually happens in classrooms. No doubt, the community panicked when a few trained educators began to show that the emperor had no clothes, and felt they needed to divert attention away from the continuing classroom chaos and efforts to silence criticism of failed policies.

Have teachers show you their grade books, discipline reports, lesson plans, tests, receipts for supplies they paid for themselves, etc., and then see if you can see any evidence that the “plan” has changed anything happening in our classrooms. Except mabe for the worse.